NBA, NHL free-agent seasons are here

This morning, our own Rob Oller chimed in on LeBron James, opining that The King’s free-agent decision will come down to three factors: winning, loyalty and legacy.

I have long thought that legacy is the key. It is true that if James leaves Cleveland, he will wear a one-ton bling-bling chain, with the bejeweled words “Game 5” weighing heavily on his neck, for the rest of his life. I think his pending decision is that elemental.

James is 23 years old and he has already taken the Cavs to the conference finals and The Finals. We can’t put ourselves in his shoes, but we can all relate to this: Does he want to leave now, bolt Cleveland and Akron, with his job unfinished? Can he quit like this on Northeast Ohio, forever unredeemed, like a common home-wrecker?

Maybe LeBron can, especially if Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov convinces LeBron he can make him a billionaire by the age of 33. but goodness, what a thing to do to oneself. Yahoo’s Adrian Wojnarowski hammered home this point, among other solid points, in his latest missive on LeBron. Woj reports that the Bulls are the favorites, the Cavs are a close second choice and the Nets are the big wild card in all of this. (The Heat are a long, long shot).

My very biased opinion is that Woj is one of the best – maybe THE best – of the national NBA writers. And he has been consistently plugged into the inner workings of LeBron’s considerable posse. He has been an excellent read throughout this time of gut-wrenching intrigue.

If you have never heard of World Wide Wes, check out Woj’s stuff (such as this piece coming out of the draft last week). For some more background, read this profile from the July 2007 issue of GQ magazine, which wonders whether World Wide Wes is the most powerful man in all of sports.

The NBA free-agent market opens at 12:01 a.m. Friday morning (about an hour away, as of this writing). Teams can negotiate with free agents, but cannot officially sign them until July 8, a day after the league pegs a salary-cap number.

It's different in the NHL. Call, sell, sign, budda-bing, buddah-boom. Usually, this makes for a crazier front in the NHL, But that is not the case this year, and for one simple reason. The NBA’s class of free agents may be the strongest class in any sport, ever. We may never again see such a class. It is obviously headlined by James, but it also includes Dwyane Wade, Chirs Bosh, Joe Johnson, Paul Pierce, Dirk Nowitzki, David Lee, Rudy Gay, Amar’e Stoudamire, Tracy McGrady, Carlos Boozer, Ray Allen and Shaquille O’Neal.

There’s a team out there that will get two of these guys and that team will be an instant threat to a Kobe three-peat. And there will be other major ramifications. Some teams will be fortified. Some will spend too much, change their chemistry for the worse and saddle their cap for years to come. And so on. This class will tilt the NBA fore and aft, like no class ever has.

As for the NHL, the free-agent class is one of the thinnest in years.

It is topped by Ilya Kovalchuk, who has managed to put up huge numbers and still be construed as a major disappointment. The Kings and the Blues are said to be his hottest pursuers. (Brace yourself Jackets fans: The Blues are about to buttress themselves with one or two huge signings and make the Central an even more hellish division while the Jackets wait to poke at the free-agent leftovers.)

After Kovalchuk, there is a raft of defensemen who will be slathered with cash. Most of them are merely solid. It can be said, however, that Dan Hamhuis, Paul Martin and Anton Volchenkov are very good players. Not one of the three is as sexy a free-agent defenseman as we’ve seen crop up in other years (such as Chris Pronger), but these three guys aren’t exactly dogs, either. Any one of them would be placed in the Jackets’ top pair, post-haste. (Is that damnable, either way?)

One of the three could play a part in getting a defenseman to Columbus. Try this out: The Vancouver Canucks, say, want to make a splash and they gobble up Hamhuis and choke him with coin. Once the deal is done, the Canucks look at their roster and notice that they already have a full compliment of middle- to high-priced defensemen – alphabetically, Keith Ballard, Kevin Bieksa, Alex Edler, Christian Ehrhoff, Shane O’Brien and Sami Salo. Upon reflection, the Canucks look to lessen the logjam and ease salary-cap pressure by making a trade. The Jackets are waiting to see which teams find themselves in such a position, and they will enter the fray when the post-signing, cap-relieving trade season begins (probably, around August 1st, but it could be sooner).

Lastly, on the World Cup front, here’s a lead that can’t be ignored:

BERLIN (Reuters) - An octopus with possible psychic powers, who has correctly picked the winner of Germany’s four World Cup matches so far, on Tuesday tipped Germany to beat Argentina in their World Cup quarter-final match on Saturday.

Here’s the link to the full story.

If that Octopus lived in Detroit, he'd be Zamboni fodder.

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